Decentralized organizations enable work to be distributed to the community members instead of being entirely driven by top-down decision making hierarchies. While tokens financially align participants to contribute value to such a network, it is grassroots community leadership and ownership that enables the long-term success of a token network.

Ownership is not fostered through financial incentive design but rather through a long-term focus on community building. Without a sense of ownership, you will struggle to attract the necessary contributors to decentralize different areas of protocol operations, such as governance and working groups, for your token network.

We can think of the community building process as a 3-stage funnel that takes a potential member from the community discovery stage to sustained positive-sum participation. In building this funnel, community builders should aim to do the following:

1. Creating opportunities for people to discover the community/project
2. Creating ways for people to get involved meaningfully
3. Creating opportunities for participants to build a sense of ownership

1. Creating opportunities for intrinsically motivated contributors to discover the community

Early on with token networks, a large part of your focus should be generating ‘top of the funnel’ awareness to attract community participants.

This work might include:

• Community branding and communications
• Content creation and features in media publications
• Retroactive token distributions and airdrops
• Collaborations and partnerships with other relevant communities
• Community events such as hackathons, panels, and community calls
• 1-on-1 external outreach to potentially relevant potential contributors

Your goal here is to attract primarily intrinsically motivated community members as opposed to purely extrinsic reasons.

• Intrinsically motivated network participants are driven by internalized reasons, such as alignment with the project’s ethos, mission, or even other personal or professional goals. Intrinsically motivated community members form strong communities and sustain their participation even when the monetary upside is uncertain.
• Extrinsically motivated network participants are often driven by external rewards such as financial gain or attention and often optimize for zero-sum short-term self-gain. Extrinsically motivated community members form the basis for weak communities and drive away other, more intrinsically motivated participants. This is especially common in bull markets, where you’ll notice an influx of extrinsically motivated people in your communication channels driven by token price movements.

While people tend to be motivated by various reasons, the goal here is to center the community to attract and retain long-term intrinsically driven participants. Like attracts like, and this applies both ways.